Moving Right Along

The real date of post: 3/31/09

I read the book during my morning commutes, and there are times where I dogeared the page because it so uncannily describes me or Gary (via Praise goggles) or me'n'Gary. Or more simply, in the words of Homer Simpson: "It's funny because it's true."

For instance, on page 5, he says, "...we had been destined for one another. We learnt that both of us had been born at around midnight in the same month of an even-numbered year. Both of us had played clarinet and had parts in school productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Both of us had two large freckles on the toe of the left foot and a cavity in the same rear molar. Both of us had a habit of sneezing in bright sunlight and of drawing ketchup out of its bottle with a knife." This struck me as hilarious because every romantic I know does this "romantic fatalism" game, where they start seeing all the coincidences in their relationship. Gary and I are too practical to do that seriously, but sometimes we can't help it either: We were both in Chicago at the same time before coming to Asia. Our Korea contract dates are one day apart: 8/24 and 8/25. Our birthdays are two days apart, 7/25 and 7/27, exactly ten years apart. AD NAUSEUM.

However, we do agree that we are ready to be done with this book'n'blog--in fact, I think Gary only read half of it and skimmed the rest; his response is conspicuously ambiguous when I ask him if he's finished it. It wasn't engaging enough; in a good novel, we expect movement, at least to the point where we'd want to read it even when it's lights-out (I just wanna finish this chapter!).

In all fairness, de Botton writes "essays" with all his points numbered (1. Love blah blah 2. Love blahbity blah 3. Love lalalala), which Gary, the walking Wikipedia, says is reminiscent of some philosopher of course I forget whom already. But then, I'm entertained by people like David Sedaris, who also does the whole collection of essays thing. (Don't be a snob. He's on NPR for a reason. Don't be a snob about that either.) It's because David Sedaris doesn't write about only one imaginary lover and all her (well, his) idiosyncracies and their less-than-exciting adventures, adding his ruminations about love, and then it's page 126 and nothing has happened yet. Plus, Sedaris is simply funnier. Jesus Shaves? Youth in Asia? Come on. Hilares.

The reason that I don't expect "movement" in Sedaris's books is that each essay is what it is. As witty as de Botton can be at times, he weaves a love story into the seams of philosophical meandering; a person like me, then, wants to skip through the chapters to see what happens with the narrator and his girlfriend, only to be disappointed at the lack of buildup in their characters by the time the climax of their story hits. [WARNING: SPOILER ALERT] For example, on page 156, the male character finally makes some pointed, confrontational comments:
"It's like there's a wall between us and you're refusing to acknowledge it's there."
"I don't see a wall."
"That's what I mean. You're refusing to admit there was ever anything other than this."
"Than what?"
OOOH. Now we're cookin'. I can feel the tension. I can see her trying to pretend she can prolong the inevitable break-up.

Then, for the next four pages, points 7-9, he philosophizes. I DO think his points are insightful. I see what he's saying about "romantic terrorism," that once someone starts losing the power of holding the other's interest, they start to wreak havoc in ways that "betray all the signs of childish rage, a rage at one's own impotence in the face of a more powerful adversary." I have been a romantic terrorist (ask my high school boyfriend, whom I was "with" for a year after we broke up) and I have dated romantic terrorists (guys have given me crazy speeches about MY fear of commitment or MY unrealistic standards when I tell them I don't want to date them anymore). However, by page 156 as opposed to page 5, I don't feel a connection with the two characters, I am tired of his poignant rants, and I just want to know if they make it or not.

I remember my friend Thad watching "Friends"- an episode from the Ross and Rachel saga - and he was engrossed. Beguiled. His girlfriend (my cousin) and I were watching him and smirking- Thad had always been the first to say he hated "Friends" but oh-ho! Titillated with the old R and R story. When he caught us, he said, "What. Everyone loves a love story."

It's true. Everyone loves a love story. But this book of essays doesn't have much of a love story, so that the contemplative examination of love seems rather frivolous and insubstantial. It was about two people who were attracted to each other's quirks (gap between front teeth, insatiable chocolate cravings, f-ugly luggage, love for museums) and were of the same race, SES, and age range so "falling in love" seemed easy. It makes me wonder what people's emotions are really based on. What is "falling in love" really, especially if they break up and feel like they never really knew each other anyway, or the memory of the relationship grows less important with the passing of time: "Like a century that is reduced to and symbolized by a certain pope or monarch or battle, my love affair refined itself to a few iconic moments..." (199). I mean, FOR GOD'S SAKE! All that emotion spent on someone or something that was really quite shallow, transient even! The narrator goes on for chapters after the breakup about all his complexes-- but it almost seems trifling that such a shallow relationship could provoke such intoxication with sorrow.

Or maybe that IS the point.

One last thing I liked. The narrator thinks of his fading emotions and says he feels guilty: "an infidelity to what I had at one time held so dear" (198), which I thought was so painfully true at least for a weirdo like me.

The book wasn't bad. It was a quick and easy read, perfect for morning and evening commutes. It was slightly embarrassing to hold a book that declares "ESSAYS IN LOVE" but whatever. I'm in Korea, the land of lovey dovey soap operas--Why can't they be together, even though she's a famous film star and he's only a lowly writer?! If we took random passages and extracted topics to discuss, there could be many lively discussions, but reading the book... as a book? I'm glad to be done with it and move on to more exciting reads.

Don DeLillo: A 30 year Look Back

Some notes on my reading; new ideas to work out here. I am trying to figure out how to deal with the concepts of the novelist as historiographer; how to approach memory, knowledge, the contemporary as a writer/reader; and how two novels written 30 years apart speak to each other beyond the spectacle of setting and place.

Anyway,
I was seven when Don DeLillo published Players. I am reading it now, for the first time. I like DeLillo's early novels. I am a big fan of End Zone. And I am enjoying Players, too. There is a sarcasm in both novels that I am having a lot of fun with as a close reader. Maybe it's helping me enjoy/relate to characters that I would be all too willing to not like--football players, Wall Street players.

I am reading Players before I read Falling Man; I bought both together, Monday. I read in a review of Falling Man that both concerned the World Trade Center. I am not as concerned with "the two towers" as much as I am concerned with how the way a novelist can use histories and actualites in his fiction to promote a particular way of seeing History of a place, a space, a moment in time.

Hindsight, or Looking Backward for you Bellamy fans, transforms the process of recollection, messes with memory, instantly creates a tone of memorialization. There is a stability, in my opinion, in the novel--a fiction--that does not exist in a history. Players in 1977 is Players in 2007. The World Trade Center and the people who lived and worked there, and around there, in 1977 are not the people there today. The history has been revised; or one might say, it has been in revision and will always be in revision. But I am still thinking one dimensionally here. There is much to work out.

I think it's in the beginning of Chapter 6 from A Light in August that Faulkner, as he introduces readers to the beginning of Joe Christmas, writes that "Memory believes before knowing remembers." I wonder how much memory can believe (it knows) before knowing remembers (what it has learned.) Some character in a story might remark on a thing's impermanence, but that doesn't necessarily represent a knowing or a believing. Faulkner's opening to that chapter in one of my favorite novels has always haunted me. I have tried to fathom the passages (the first sentence and the ones that follow) for some time. I am fascinated with his notion of recollection, of instantaneous recall that is much like the birth of a human being, who once born has within him, Joe Christmas in this example, his destiny already there to be born as well. And so when a character says about the World Trade Center, almost thirty years before it is demolished, that it lacks permanence, the burdensome weight of inevitability shows itself.

That the World Trade Center is a character in DeLillo's 1977 novel, that the characters experience fears of terrorism after inexplicable acts of violence, that things (namely, the two towers, but also love, sexual desire, understanding, et al) lack permanence, and that the characters are sound and appear so bored that they reflect on boredom privately and publicy: A reader, like me, cannot help but think, "How did DeLillo know?" But is this concern I have now only present because of a coincidence or is there something that connects events (the novels, in this case, published 30 years apart) as contemporaries and therefore, in a historical sense, worth looking at together?

I know the problems, theoretical and practical, DeLillo appears to address in Players because I know them here and now. And this is a here and now that is quite a bit different than the there and then of his 1977 novel. I am recalling my knee-jerk amazement in the timeliness-before-its-time of Players until 1) I read it and read Falling Man and 2) take a few moments to figure out how history and historiography figures into this.

One question I already have lingering as I finish the 1997 novel:
Won't I find what I am certain I'll find--connections, prescience really--in any text I read? This certainty a sort of radical certainty, to borrow from Lacan. I mean, can't we admit that I'll convince myself and others (let's say, as a teacher?)

I hope to be able to consider how DeLillo the novelist and DeLillo the historian (or, is it historiographer?) work together to produce the effect--30 years on and his books are pointing out consistencies in contemporaneity that many of us wish weren't there. For example, isn't the relatively short history of the World Trade Center bound to be considered an impermanence when the place (or is it space?) is new and, more so even, when it is gone? After all, such monstrosities as those two tall buildings in such a small space can create a space in which one might worry about how long it is supposed to last--the strength the World Trade Center represents: strength in engineering, wealth, market, etc.

more to follow...